"You'll forever be stuck under the baker's thumb/ You keep dealing with them crumbs/ Keep dealing with them bums who receive their funds in minute-sized sums." Such goes a line from "Why Wouldn't I" but elsewhere, he lets off punchlines brimming with self-satisfaction and double entendre.Īs far as surprises go, you'll have to take what you can get here- the beats are just functional, even if the brazen Queen rip on "All For It" is kinda hilarious for never bothering to be cleared. Whether it's due to his no-nonsense subject matter or pugnacious persona, Beans rarely gets the credit he deserves as a lyrical craftsman, but there's not much to distract you this time around from his haughty humor, rife with internal rhyme and off-kilter cadence. It might be a simplified rendering of Beans, but it's tough to care when it's so damn entertaining.
"The ignorance is coming," he intones, and while that likely refers to the title of his yet unannounced new album, you can be goddamn sure that the ignorance is here right now. *Befitting its stopgap, low-stakes formation, Bully is as about as subtle as a curb-stomping and every bit as straightforward, 12 tracks that mostly go into rich detail about you being a sucker and Beanie's ability to beat the living shit out of you. That's not the Sigel you get on The Broad Street *Bully. Hell, it's not only an improvement over The Solution, but it's better than most other rap albums out there too- such is the reality when we get Beanie in his natural state talking serious shit with only State Property alums as guests.īeanie Sigel isn't a complex MC so much as a conflicted one- The B.Coming is by far his best record because it managed to show how his remorse felt every bit as frightening as his anger, the sort of thing that makes all those tracks he did with Scarface a natural fit. Whether it's seeing Freeway sign with Rhymesayers or, you know, Roc-A-Fella disintegrating, Beanie's realized it's time to move on and offers "the lost files" on The Broad Street Bully, which trades in the same irony as so many other similarly positioned mixtapes: It's constructed in a manner that pleases the sort of people who might actually pay for a Beanie Sigel album, and yet, it's being given away for free.